by Robert Ovies
Terry smiled. “I’ve seen you out here.”
“I’ve seen you too. You’re a friend of Diane Brooks.”
“I know her, yeah. She goes out with a buddy of mine, over there.” He gestured toward a group of students gathered just beyond the wall of the porch, four boys and four girls, all of them listening intently to a very thin girl with red hair who waved her hands in the air as she spoke. He said, “You know Dave MacInnes?”
Marie put up her hand to shade her eyes from the afternoon sun. “Yeah, I do. I know Diane kind of likes him.”
“You dating anybody?” Terry asked.
“No, but I live a long way from here,” Marie said, nodding her head toward the north. “Up in the wilderness, in the mountains. It’s hard for me to go out with friends.”
“Is that right?”
Aunt Leah called Marie’s name again, now from just thirty yards away. This time she dragged it out so it wasn’t so much a name anymore, but rather just a sound, like something from a tall bird. “Mrieeeee!”
Terry looked to see the source of the sound. Marie didn’t.
He said, “Is that your mom?”
“My aunt.”
He watched the woman in white and waited, expecting more.
“She’s okay,” Marie said. “She’s wound pretty tight, though.”
“She comes and takes you out of here every day?”
“I live with her.”
“With your aunt?”
“Her and my uncle. Her brother, not her husband.”
He studied Aunt Leah again for nearly five seconds. “And they won’t let you drive?”
“I don’t have my license yet, but I will soon.”
Looking back at Marie, he tilted his head. “Your folks around?”
“Died. When I was a kid.”
“I’m sorry. How’d it happen?”
From twenty yards away: “Mrieeeee. I think we should be going now.”
“Car accident. My uncle and I survived, they didn’t. He was driving. I live with him now, him and her.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven. I remember it. I have a scar from it over my knee. My uncle got one, too, on his face, so we both remember it, every day.”
“Wow,” Terry whispered. Quickly, eyeing the approaching aunt, he withdrew his phone from his pocket and asked, “Marie, right? Can I call you? What’s your number?”
“I don’t have a phone of my own, but I can give you my home number.”
By the time Terry had typed the last digit, Leah was climbing the stairs to the porch. “Marie, it’s really time to be going.”
“I’m going to hug you,” Marie whispered to Terry with a sudden sparkle in her eyes. “Follow what I say, okay?”
As Leah closed in on them, Marie said to Terry, “I’ll see you tomorrow, honey.” Then she reached for his neck with her free arm to pull him close.
Terry did what she asked him to do, and did it grinning. His arms went around her waist. He pulled her closer and squeezed, pressing his cheek into hers. He even managed to sneak a peek at the aunt’s reaction.
But Aunt Leah didn’t look shocked at all. She didn’t even raise a eyebrow.
Marie pulled away. “I’ll skip lunch again tomorrow,” she said, smiling at Terry again. “I’ll see you then.”
“Yeah,” Terry said quietly but sounding very much in earnest. “I’ll see you then.”
Marie, visibly pleased with Terry’s response, turned, adjusted the weight of her backpack and walked past her aunt with a jaunty, “Better head out, Aunt Leah.”
Leah said, “All right, dear,” but she didn’t move. She stared at the boy, who was still grinning but looking a little uncertain about whether he should be.
She appeared to be neither angry nor amused. She took a single step toward the boy and said in a voice that was firm and low and even, “I’m sure you’re intelligent enough to limit this kind of thing to the show she puts on for her Aunt Leah.”
Then she turned to walk rigidly with her only niece down the steps and back across the long green lawn.
For most of the ride back to their home on Bruce Lake, Marie listened to her CDs and stared out the window. She didn’t use the earphones, since there was nothing in the music to launch her aunt into a discussion of the destructive power of negative lyrics. Just some easy Spanish guitar, and then, as they climbed to higher elevations, one of the many “Best” collections of Ella Fitzgerald.
They entered the Pecos Wilderness northeast of Santa Fe and moved into the hills of aspens and pines, where the Pecos River broke fresh from the rock twenty miles to their east and the sharp young heights strained to become the southern altitudes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
“I say this lovingly,” Aunt Leah said, suddenly breaking their silence with her most soothing voice, “but I am curious, Marie. Do you enjoy yourself tremendously with that kind of game playing? Or is it just so-so for you? Something to amuse yourself while I walk with considerable pain all the way across the lawn, calling out to no response like a doddering fool?”
Marie continued staring out the window for a full twenty seconds. “I may be in love with Terry, Aunt Leah,” she said. “Is that what you call game playing?”
Silence.
A small, spring-fed lake named for a long-dead trapper’s mother, Lake Roselie, slid by on their right.
Marie said, “I didn’t think about your knee.”
More silence.
“I know it hurts you sometimes, but I didn’t think of it,” she admitted softly, finally turning to look at her aunt. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, dear.” A long minute passed before Leah added, “And I would just ask, dear, please don’t despair of your lifestyle. I know what goes through your mind, but you have no idea what you’ll find springing up for you. Can you believe that? That wonderful things are going to spring up for you?”
Marie squirmed to sit upright. They were about to circle the southern tip of Rancho Del Mundo, one of the largest areas of private property in the wilderness area and the fifteen-mile mark from their home. She said, “I know,” softly, hoping that her aunt would accept it as the end of their conversation and be quiet again, at least for a few minutes, at least long enough to let Marie stare out the window and not be distracted.
The clearing that spread wide and deep into the hillside came into view. Deep greens in tall grass moved in the breeze like the surface of a lake. Seventy yards from the road, a cold mountain stream tumbled lightly from north to south along a concave ring of trees, tracing a dazzling line through the clearing. The late afternoon sun glowed in the stream and in the grass and in the arms of the pines that walled off the interior like a curtain.
It was a place that Marie felt connected to in an extraordinary way. It gave her the feeling that it was where she herself was living, even now, although hidden from her own sight. It was as if who or what she really was had been magically knitted to this very special place, to those trees, to that grass, to that stream.
It was the strangest and most beautiful sensation.
She had one other “soul-place”, as she called it, very much like this one. A place in the pines next to the lake just south of her home.
In fact, the sense of connection that she experienced in these magical places was so striking that she had once seriously wondered, when she was barely a teenager, whether places outside herself could actually have been created, or at least infused with something special, through her own will—as though she might have whispered her own magic into them. Maybe without even knowing it, but so that something of herself, something about who she really was and what she really wanted to be, was invisibly embedded there, maybe for all time.
She felt equally connected to her mother and father. Even though their bodies had died, she felt them with her, still. And, in these special places, the bond that still linked her with her parents felt stronger than at any other time, in any other place. It felt so strong and so real th
at as she gazed out of Leah’s car she said to her mother excitedly, without sound, “Look how the stream by the trees sparkles today, Mom. It’s like the field is wearing a necklace!”
It was those moments that kept her fed inside, even while she lived in a home without deep affection and without humor. It was the certain ground to her that no one could take away. It held her mother and father closer to her than her own breath.
The forest closed over the last view of Rancho Del Mundo. They were nine miles from home.
Clearing the top of a steep hill, the road began a sweeping curve to their right.
Marie said quietly, as if to the window, “I’d really like to see some of the people at school more.”
Leah glanced at her.
“Am I going to get my driver’s license soon?” Marie turned back to her aunt. “I don’t need a car of my own, but I’m old enough to be using this one.”
“Trust me, dear. You will have an extraordinarily full life.”
“I’m not talking about a rich, full life, Aunt Leah. I’m just talking about driving the car. I’m asking you seriously, is there something the matter with my driving the car?”
Leah flicked another glance in her direction but remained silent.
“It’s the only way I’ll be able to make friends. That doesn’t mean anything to you, but it does to me.”
They traveled another half mile in silence.
“See?” Marie said, not bothering to hide her frustration. “You say things, but you don’t really talk with me about them. I ask you questions, and you’re just suddenly, ‘Okay, I’m not talking anymore.’ But you don’t even say that. When you don’t say anything at all for five minutes, then I’m supposed to know: ‘Hey, my aunt’s not talking to me anymore.’ ”
“Don’t, Marie, please,” Leah said, turning to her niece, looking both hurt and sympathetic.
“Well, what’s the matter with questions like, Am I going to get a license like a normal sixteen-year-old? Or even, Could I get a car, like my only two halfway close friends have? It doesn’t have to be a new one; I don’t care. Or a question like, Am I ever going to get my own cell phone? Or, Is Uncle John ever going to sell this house and buy another one within five hundred miles of another human being, for Pete’s sake? He’s got enough money.”
“Your uncle is a remarkably caring man,” Leah said. “And I don’t know about cars right now. I think this year, when school is out, we’ll be taking a trip. Your uncle has talked about taking us to see South America.”
“South America?”
“It would be premature to say anything definite, but he has discussed it, yes.”
“South America?”
“We’ll all talk about it. But wouldn’t that be the chance of a lifetime?”
“We won’t talk about it, though, will we?” Marie unhooked her seat belt and brought her knees up to her chest. “It’ll all be decided and I’ll just be told, ‘That’s it.’ ” Her arms circled her legs. Her hand absentmindedly pulled at the top of her sock. She leaned against the door and turned toward the window again.
Leah reached to touch her arm. “Just know that we love you, dear. Know that we believe with all of our hearts that you have a remarkable future ahead of you.” She paused, looking at Marie critically, then added, “And you really must wear your seat belt.”
5
For more than ten years after Kieran’s father was shot and killed, his mother, Maureen, dulled the knives of her loss with alcohol. As she disintegrated more deeply into the disease, she left her children hostage to it, as well.
After a decade of dying slowly and to no one’s surprise more than her own, things changed. On a warm Saturday night in Belfast’s New Evangel Fellowship Church, Maureen Lynch found herself accepting Jesus as her Lord and Savior and Alcoholics Anonymous as her highest discipline.
She tried her best to share her faith in her own home. She read things from the Bible to Kieran and his older sister, Colleen, saying “Jesus promised you” this or that, or “God says to us in the book of. . .” this or that. She told them about Adam and Eve and Moses and Isaiah. She said over and over that Jesus died for them, to save them from their sins. She hoped it helped them, but she knew it helped her, as she lived simply and raised Kieran and Colleen as best she could in a home with no husband for her or father for the children.
Through all those years, though, Kieran had been a withdrawn and deeply angry boy, as he and Colleen—who, for reasons no one in the family ever understood, grew up somewhat mentally deficient—became not only brother and sister to one another, but in some ways father and mother and best friends, as well. Kieran was the protector, Colleen the listener, consoler and worrier.
But their youth made them a poor father and mother, and the bitterness of losing their father, as well as losing so much of their mother, given her need to work and her need to drink, which was replaced by her need for church activities, made them troubled best friends.
Kieran’s brooding and sudden flights into rage, which had already exploded into violent clashes both in the streets and at school, seemed relentless. He refused to relate to his mother but chose, instead, the company of Crawl, whom his mother had taken into their home in the naive hope that male companionship might help to settle her son.
Colleen, physically attractive but nearly always sad, lived out her loneliness in the conviction that her failed attempts to enter the high-energy world of girls her age but not of her mental limitations proved that she was an inadequate human being.
She once confided to Kieran, on the evening of her fifteenth birthday, when it was raining for the third straight day, that she could never quite decide what she should feel sorry about next. Four months later, when she was barely sixteen, Colleen died in the deep cold of an early winter. She died alone.
Driven by the confusion of too much loss, Kieran’s rage escalated. For more than three years, with Crawl as his mentor, he drove himself into the hard edges of the UVF, as well as into a series of other illegal adventures. But in those years, in the brooding times of looking backward rather than forward, Kieran also came to recognize something critical. Colleen, who had cried to him more than once because she could never do anything right, really did do something right, because she never stopped trying. Even when Kieran no longer wanted her help, she kept trying. Even when she embarrassed herself and embarrassed him, as she tried to keep up with the other kids her own age, she kept trying. Even when she ran away from home and everything that had gone wrong, she was still trying. She died that way: still trying.
He found he wanted to tell her so badly that she had done well to keep trying, and to tell her he loved her for it, that on the fourth anniversary of her death, with just a slight encouragement from alcohol, he did it. He shouted it out loud, through tears, standing on top of the concrete railing of Lagan Bridge at two o’clock in the morning.
It was a fruitless shout about things hoped for and doubted, but it opened a door. On that night, Kieran made a commitment to his dead sister. He determined that if Colleen had never stopped trying, with all that she had to overcome, he would, for the first time in his life, steel himself to do the same. For her, and for whatever else turned up in his life that might be as good as her, he would really try.
He pulled back from his involvement with the Force, which Colleen had begged him to leave a dozen times, always with no effect. He pulled back from his entanglement with Crawl. No more plots, no more breaking and entering, no more loaded guns with their safeties off kept close for clouded reasons.
He spoke again with his mother, trying to heal the distance between them. He even tried, for the first time in his life, to anticipate what she needed and to make it happen for her. Before long, his anticipation deepened into affection, his affection deepened into love, and his love deepened into commitment. He would not fail his mother in the same way he had failed his sister, who, he had finally come to realize, had always been his best friend. It had never been Crawl. It had
been Colleen, all along.
And now, it was Brenna.
Kieran’s arm wrapped underneath her shoulder, holding her close as they lay together in the dark. Brenna’s head was on his chest. It was 2:25 A.M., but even the late hour and too many stouts couldn’t overcome the energy of Italy and fifty thousand pounds and all the serious questions that were so clear to them now and all the answers that were not.
Was it a simple act of corporate espionage, a copying of records, a bugging of offices, a threatening of enemies? Was it really without risk or weapons or the chance of anyone being hurt or caught or killed? Or was it more? Was it more than they wanted? Was it so much more that they would have to drop the money on the table and walk away, regardless of Day’s threats?
“That’s where Michael is key,” Kieran had said to Crawl. “If we know who Day is, where he lives, what he does, then we say to him, if he talks about seeing our heads in a box again, ‘That’s no good anymore, because we know where to get at you, too. And our friends know.’ ”
At least it was leverage.
But Crawl had taken it even further. “That’s right. We tell him, ‘If anybody comes after us, you’re going to die, and your wife and kids too, and that’s a dead-bolt guarantee.’ And it would be. Michael would kill him in a heartbeat, something happens to me.”
Kieran shifted his weight and eased a little more onto his side.
Why think about that? Nothing was going to happen. No weapons, no risk, nothing stolen.
Michael had only a week to find the man’s identity, but he would have a good part of the money Day had already given to Kieran and Crawl, enough of it to find out what they wanted to know. Michael, after all, was a man who knew what he was doing.
“Tell me about that fellow and the petrol,” Brenna whispered, bringing Kieran back to the moment.
She opened her eyes and turned, looking at Kieran, barely visible in the dark. When he didn’t answer right away, she glanced at the clock, then turned to him again. “Would you tell me?”
He murmured, “God, girl. It was nothing.”
